Narrative Truthiness

The Logic of Complex Truth in Hybrid (Non)Fiction

Annjeanette Wiese

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781496226792
• eBook ISBN: 9781496228543
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Narrative Truthiness explores the complex nature of truth by adapting Stephen Colbert's concept of truthiness (which on its own repudiates complexity) into something nuanced and positive, what Annjeanette Wiese calls "narrative truthiness." Narrative truthiness holds on to the importance of facts while complicating them by looking at different types of truth, as well as the complexity, contradictions, and consequences of truth in the context of human experience. Wiese uses narrative theory to analyze several examples of hybrid (non)fiction: works that refuse to exist as either fiction or nonfiction alone and that challenge monolithic definitions of truth. She examines memoirs by Lauren Slater, Michael Ondaatje, Binjamin Wilkomirski, Tim O'Brien; fiction by Julian Barnes, Richard Powers, W. G. Sebald; Onion headlines; comics and graphic memoirs by Joe Sacco, Art Spiegelman, and David Small; and fake news. Narrative Truthiness foregrounds the complexity that is inherent in human understanding and experience and in the process demonstrates the significance of the complex tensions between what we feel to be true and what is true, and how we are shaped by both.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Narrative Truthiness and Hybrid (Non)Fiction
• Part 1. Autobiography and Memoir
• 1. Telling What Is True: Truthiness and Figural Truths in Lauren Slater’s Writing
• 2. In Pursuit of Truth in Life Narrative: Reading Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family
• 3. Narrative Truthiness and the Author-Reader Contract: The Failure of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Memoir Fragments
• Part 2. Fiction
• 4. Impossible Biographies: Theory and (Non)Fiction in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot
• 5. Narrative Truthiness, Connectivity, and Factuality in Fiction: The Case of Richard Powers’s Three Farmers
• 6. Lost (in) History: Fact and Fiction in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz
• Part 3. Other Genres and Media
• 7. Satire and Truth: Fake News, the Onion, and the Complex Nature of Narrative Truthiness
• 8. Conflicting Categories: Graphic Narratives and the Image of Truth
• Conclusion: An Argument for Narrative Truthiness—Tim O’Brien and Using Complex Narrative to Counter Fake News
• Notes
• References
• Index